Why is Play Like a Champion Today® in Uganda?
It’s a very good question that deserves a thoughtful answer.
It is a long distance to travel to a small, lesser-known country, so the
decision to go to Uganda merits an explanation.
At PLACT, we strive to make a positive impact on the lives
of children, with a firmly held belief that youth sports can have a lasting
effect on its participants. The PLACT philosophy aims to make that effect a
positive one that is life-giving, character-building, and fun. We have seen the
positive role that sports play on youth in our own country, and by going to
Uganda, we hope to thoughtfully and humbly use our model to try to make a
difference in the lives of Ugandan children.
Although we believe that sports can play a positive role in
lives, regardless of their environment, we recognize that a child’s
surroundings will greatly affect the role that sports plays in his or her life.
There are no frantic parents at Ugandan soccer games; if a
mother has been lucky enough to live to see her child grow up to play soccer,
chances are she is hard at work all day on the farm trying to eke out a living
for her family. And Ugandan kids aren’t worrying excessively about becoming the
next Michael Jordan; they are just trying to get a break from a day that can
include 10 hours in a classroom of 100 students, hours of laboring in the
fields, taking care of siblings, doing laundry by hand, cooking, and sharing a
bedroom with 6 other people.
Yet there are cross-cultural beauties in athletics that this
endeavor seeks to champion! The same joy that comes when a Notre Dame athlete
wins a national title befalls a child scoring his first soccer goal in an
obscure village. The same concern that teammates show for each other transcends
location, whether it is an urban school in Kampala or the Super Dome in New
Orleans.
So as Youth Sports and Community Programming Manager Kevin
Dugan puts it, this trip is “a celebration of the enormous human potential of
the young people of Uganda.” We hope to share with Uganda educators and
children the insights we have gained through our years of exposure to youth
sports. Equally as important, we hope to learn from Ugandans the best ways that
sports can be a means of developing human potential, so that we may further
develop our role as leaders in the field of child development. These
partnerships are essential, because it would be impossible for us to maximize
our potential acting alone.
I will leave you with a story from my time in Uganda:
Every morning before I went to school, I went out for a
beautiful 7 mile run through hills surrounding the place I lived. One day it
was raining heavily, and the roads became very muddy: impassible for any kind
of vehicle. I fell down in the mud, but proceeded to continue running. Soon
enough, I heard footsteps behind me. It was a student of mine, eager to run
alongside me, and worried for my well-being in the rain. “It’s OK, I told him,
you go take cover in your house,” I assured him.
“But sir you need me, just like I need you as a teacher. We
run together.”
In this world, the fate of every human is tied up with one
another. PLACT and the ND Athletics Department are amazed by the synergetic
relationships we are forming in a little-known corner of the planet to change
the lives of children the world over.
